Orange Blossoms

by

Bob Waltrip

I stand on the rain-wetted ground of Summit Cemetery, looking at a stone and reading the name, "Tish." Clouds are still hanging over my small home town, but the rain has stopped. This river village of my youth is alien to me now-no longer mine. But as I stand over Tish's grave memories come to me, timidly, haltingly. Poignant memories of my fourteen-year-old world that was made up of Summit, Arizona and Merit Badges and American Literature and fishing tackle and guns. Once again I see Tish, the small Indian boy. Quick, sturdy, compact, exuberant. The perfect brown boy as wildly beautiful as the purple mountains surrounding the town.

We walked together, the white boy and the Indian. Tish was half Sioux and half Hopi. Harry, Tish's father, was a tall dark warrior of a man, who worked with my father and was his best friend. They were carpenters-builders of towering pine skeletons that would never fall. Tish's mother, Alice, was short and fat like mine, and spent afternoons in Mom's kitchen, drinking coffee and smoking Camels and talking about how to make the paper-thin Hopi bread we all enjoyed. Tish was their only child, and they were fiercely proud of him. They were as modern as we, but still loved their tribes and traditions. Only the very old Indians at the Summit Reservations nearby still spoke in their tribal tongues. Tish didn't know a single word of Sioux or Hopi, and spoke with no westernmovie accent. But his face and figure and carriage bespoke another era, when boys of his age ran and hunted and tamed horses wilder than God Himself.

I stand above his grave now, and sketches of our life together come back. It was almost midnight, and we were lying on the grass outside my house. Blankets were spread, and we drank mellow Mexican coffee my brother had brought from San Luis. The smell of orange blossoms was thick in the spring air, mixed with the odor of our forbidden cigarettes. For two hours we had talked, surrounded by sleeping houses. And we talked still of the thousand topics of boyhood; of naked women, the Army, money, football, swimming, the size of Bo Jackson's penis and Julie Vickson's breasts; of our families, our past, and our future. Boys' talk, that filled the night with sudden bursts of laughter as well as long silences.

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